At ManOrga, Valk Welding has installed nine robots, eight of them are welding robots. At the end of the year, the extension of 10,000 m², including 8,000 m² of workshops, encouraged the creator of metal shelving to invest in additional robotized welding equipment.
For half a century ManOrga has been manufacturing metal shelving systems, industrial platforms (mezzanine) and wire mesh partitions.
Located in Lys les Lannoy (59), its two current factories - 24,000 m² in total - transform 70 to 80 tons of steel every day.
With a turnover of €65M, in constant growth, the company employs 250 people, supplemented, depending on the workload, by 50 to 70 temporary workers.
“We work almost exclusively on orders, 35 hours a week in two seven-hour shifts, and for each order, our design office details each platform according to the customer’s requirements. Our organization allows us to respond to orders within 48 hours in the field, and throughout Europe. At the customer’s site, each product and shelving assembly team works in close collaboration with ManOrga,” explains David Duhamel, head of Industrial Engineering.
The raw material, of which the permanent stock represents several hundred tons, is supplied in the form of coils (metal coils from cold rolling).
To create its products, the company has more than 400 machines, including 11 profiling lines that unwind, straighten, punch, shape and shear the strips of sheet metal in order to create different profiles: posts, shelves, bottoms, ladders, rails, etc., at a rate of 12km of steel transformed daily and 800m² of platforms created each day.
Although the maximum thickness of the profiles is four millimetres, thicker accessory components (up to 15mm) are also required for the platforms and metal shelving.
After the profiling of the profiles, several welding operations are necessary to complete each component.
In order to industrialize this step, as early as 2014, ManOrga selected a Valk Welding TA-1400WG robot on a five-meter track, with a ferris wheel positioner capable of welding posts up to five meters long. The same year a second TA-1800WG robot was also integrated into the manufacturing lines.
In 2016, the firm invested in another TM-1600WG two-robot cell for welding rails. This unit combines a fixed robot with a three-meter linear transfer robot fed with parts, up to four meters in length, by a ferris wheel.
Building on its technological relationship with the European specialists in robotic welding, ManOrga repeated this in 2018 with another twin robot system equipped with a turntable positioner. The operator loads one jig while the robots weld on the other jig. Every 45 seconds one shelf with 5 meters of profiles and tubes are produced. Thus, 8,000 metres of tubes and profiles are processed every day.
Finally, last year, another installation with a turntable extended the manufacturing capacity of the shelves with two TM-1600WG robots.
“As for robotic welding, in addition to a custom-made HMI (Human Machine Interface), we have made some jigs and tools ourselves, but we were seeing discrepancies in the final quality of the parts. The integration of these parts requires a very high precision, which is now possible thanks to the cooperation with Valk Welding, for welded assemblies with exact strength and dimensional tolerances,” continues David Duhamel.
Once welded, the shelving components will take on colours (white, yellow, blue, grey, red, orange, green...) as they will be finished on two 300 m long epoxy painting lines operating 14 hours a day.
Given its perpetual growth, ManOrga is currently building a new 10,000 m² factory, 8,000 m² of which is covered on its second site. It will be delivered at the end of 2022.
“With this extension, we are going to review the general organization of the site’s overall layout to accommodate even greater production flows,” says David Duhamel.
There is no doubt that this substantial extension will require new robotized welding equipment... To be continued!
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